Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #181564 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 48 pages

Customer Reviews

No sleeping matter
A photographer's life can be lonely. All those assignments to forsaken corners of the world. Separation from loved ones. Idleness between shoots. The traveling. Hundreds of bland interiors. No personal connection to the photo jobs. What's needed is an antidote for the road, a personal project running alongside the paid work, a means of transmogrifying even the most banal and characterless locations into something blessed.

Adam Jepessen's first book, Wake, must have served the purpose admirably. It opens with a shot of a fallen tree somewhere in a forest, hinting at evanescence and vulnerability. Then we are abruptly in city life: Atlanta, with a sink full of dirty crockery. On the facing page we are given the transcript of a desultory message spoken into an answer machine perhaps by Jepessen late one sleepless night - words meant presumably for his girl, expressing the angst of separation and longing to be home.

The co-mingling of desire and sleeplessness is the leitmotif of the book as we follow Jepessen from city to city with his brilliantly observed details of hotel rooms, deserted roads, odd phenomena of light, and moonlit buildings, all recorded over a period of seven years. The sleeplessness is palpable. We are walking those moonlit snowy roads unblinking, peering at midnight huts, staring wide-eyed sleepless at florid curtains, gazing out of chilly windows to vacant parking lots, seeing the white cat slip out to hunt. We are braced against Tokyo's blinding 24-hour neon skyline or suddenly stumbling over frozen heath. We have the world to ourselves while others sleep.

Jepessen takes us across the globe: Bangladesh, India, America, Denmark, Lebanon, always working at the phenomenological level, bucking any stereotypes we might have of these places. Each picture is carefully labeled with time and place, perhaps as a clever contrast to the placelessness and timelessness of the image, and to instill in us, the viewer, a share of the disorientation he felt during those seven years on the road.

Of 27 photographs, only three are portraits and in all cases the subject is transfixed, prisoner to their own gaze, in the small hours of a long night. One of these people, mentioned in the introductory lines, gazes into a mirror as if driven crazy by hotel rooms or crazy from peregrination, or both. The photograph is part closure to the opening text, coming as it does so near to the end of the book.

My only reservation about Wake is the editorial decision to print images across the crease; inevitably with such a small book, that interferes with the appreciation of the image. In all other respects this is an impressive and satisfying first publication. It even made Alec Soth's "Best of 2008" list: what better endorsement is there?